In operating customer care systems, conventional methods for automated recognition and understanding of user's input communications often include the implementation of a dialog manager to interact with the user. Examples of such methods are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,675,707, 5,860,063 and 6,044,337, and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/943,944, filed Oct. 3, 1997, Ser. No. 09/217,635, filed Dec. 21, 1998, Ser. Nos. 09/690,721 and 09/690,903 both filed Oct. 18, 2000, and Ser. No. 09/699,494, 09/699,495, and 09/699,496 all filed Oct. 31, 2000, each of which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
These dialog systems promise efficient and natural access to a large variety of information sources and services from any communication device. Systems that support short restricted utterances to select a particular function (responding to a prompt such as “Say credit card, collect or person-to-person”) are saving companies millions of dollars in customer care costs.
However, current systems are limited in the interaction they support and brittle in many respects. For example, current spoken dialog systems are quite limited in their strategies for detecting and repairing problems that arise in conversation.